Looking Back Facing Forward One
Reporter's View of the Balkans
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“The Serb population in Republika Srpska is being held hostage by war criminals,” says James Lyon, of the International Crisis Group. “These war criminals are plundering them on a scale similar to what Milosevic did in Serbia. Let’s look at the Serb refugees [from Sarajevo and northwest Bosnia] who are living in local towns. They are under the control of a criminal element, politicians, war criminals, who are active in the black market or who exploit these people through their control of jobs in the area. In some cases, the criminals literally prevent the refugees from leaving.”

About 45 minutes drive west of Bijeljina is Brcko, a town unique in Bosnia, being still under direct UN control. Since Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian claims to Brcko, a Muslim-plurality town before the war that is now tightly held by a new Serb majority clustered downtown, are so intractable, the international community keeps deciding not to decide its fate.

So today it has an American administrator, Ambassador Gary Matthews, and a carefully apportioned local government: A Serb mayor, Croat Deputy mayor and Bosniak president of the still un-elected District Assembly. The police have a Serb chief and Croat and Bosniak deputy chiefs and multi-ethnic patrols. This is the evidence Ambassador Matthews cites to support his claim that Brcko is “as representative of what’s supposed to be going on as any place in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” That the claim may well be true only underscores how pathetic it is. While Serb and Bosniak cops do walk beats together, and all three communities work side-by-side inside municipal and district governments, real social interaction across community lines is, the diplomat admits, “one area that’s been lacking.” But the ambassador, who has won points from all sides for his energy and affability, sees progress in one staged social event, the first post-war celebration of a Muslim holiday, which involved a reception hosted by the Serb mayor. “It couldn’t have happened last year,” says Matthews. “It would have been too soon.”

This school year did prove too soon for Ambassador Matthews’ most cherished reform strategy, consolidating Serb, Croat and Muslim high school classes. The idea was not only to mix students but combine curricula because, in Matthews’ words, “three ethnic groups going to their own separate schools at three separate locations where each was the ethnic majority, is not the way things are supposed to be heading.”

For the first month, says Matthews, “things worked fine, until the eve of the national elections, when troublemakers showed up and demonstrations ensued. The schools had to be closed for several weeks. Classes resumed about a month ago and we have not had any problems since then.”

The Ambassador’s recitation leaves out a lot.

“The Brcko school riots, I was there with my cameraman.” This report is from Salih Brkic, among the best investigative reporters working in Bosnian television. At the Brcko school, Brkic tells me, he and his cameraman “saw who was encouraging the kids, who was giving out bottled water and flags and signs and candies. They were people from the nationalist Serb Democratic Party, which is still the reigning power in Republika Srpska politics. Later, one of their people in Parliament came and made a speech praising the demonstrations.”

Though students are once again divided by ethnicity, attending different schools, or different shifts, and studying mutually exclusive, mutually antagonistic versions of local history, Matthews enthusiastically vows that next year, “we’re going to make another try.” The plan calls for all three separate schools to teach the same curricula in math, science and physical education. But what about history, language and culture where there are no such universal truths to teach? Don’t ask. Should one laugh or cry at this “plan”? Don’t tell.

“The Dayton treaty saddled us with a political construct that ratified three ethnic nationalist party monopolies.” Those are the words of a non-nationalist Serb, Mirko Pejanovic, a political science professor at Sarajevo University, who is president of the Serb Community Council in Sarajevo. These could also be the words of General Jacques Klein, the top deputy to the UN’s Special Representative in charge of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Dayton gave us three presidents—Serb, Croat and Muslim—who rotate every eight months,” Klein says. “That means no focus, no continuity, no responsibility.” Under this system, he wonders, “where the hell is the central state?”

The answer to that anguished question is ugly: The central states of the tri-furcated Bosnia and Herzegovina are little more than barely secret sharers of power and swag with the ethnic mafias left over from the war.

“What happened here,” continues the famously blunt-spoken General Klein, “is that during the war, all three sides created illegal infrastructures to buy weapons and other goods around the world. After the war, these structures were recreated into mafias.”

Today each of the one-party governments that rule, Communist-style, every aspect of the economy within their city town or county, has its own mafia, with the largest belonging to the Party for Democratic Action, the Muslim nationalist party of President Alija Itzetbegovic. “Because of the mafias,” says Klein, “we lose about $250 million a year in uncollected customs revenues and probably half a billion in unpaid taxes. That shows we have a long way to go.”

Jakob Finci, the long-time leader of Sarajevo’s 700-person Jewish community, is obsessed with another aspect of Bosnia’s long-awaited rebirth as a civil society: he wants to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Bosnia. “Not for revenge or for payback for the victims,”he says, “but to help write the history of the last ten years.”

Which is exactly what Jacques Klein says Bosnia needs, “because what we have here is Fascistic nationalist history, Communist-Marxist mumbo-jumbo, or what we historians call anecdotal history: ‘I know all about it because my grandfather was there.’ It’s all crap! What we’ve got to have is something that says, as far as the international community is concerned (and Jakob Finci would insist, even more important as far as all citizens of Bosnia are concerned), this is what caused the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. Objective history, honest history is very hard to find here, but that’s what we need more than anything else.”

Jacob Finci says Bosnia needs truth and reconciliation, and it needs them fast. “We need to make Bosnia a safe place for our children and grandchildren.” But most of these progeny, it turns out, have something else on their minds: leaving. “The last poll of our youngsters,” says Finci, “showed that 62 percent of them were ready to leave the country immediately, and 70 percent said they would leave Bosnia for the right job, because they cannot see any bright future here.”

Perhaps what they also cannot see is a normal future. “But the question of how normal things are,” says Christopher Hoh, the Deputy Chief Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, “might depend on your definition. I think a lot of people here would be very happy with a lower-level definition: no war, you can basically go about your business, have some vacation, save a little money, and not feel a threat that people are going to come and take it away from you because of who you are.”

“Things do work,” Hoh summed up, with some satisfaction at the American and international contribution to the state of things today in Bosnia. “If you compare it to some places in the world, a third world state, you’d say, ‘Hey, this isn’t too bad.’ While if you compare it to places in Europe, you’ll see that a lot of things don’t work very well.”

Bosnia, most of its residents would remind you, is and always has been, a place in Europe.

Kosovo

No people know better the value of amalgamation with Europe than the Kosovars. Like most southern Europeans, they have been exporting workers to Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia for decades. But during the last decade, when Kosovar Albanians were systematically excluded from all public employment by order of Slobodan Milosevic and his rubber-stamp Parliaments, Kosovo had the highest number of wage-earners abroad, perhaps in European history. Their remittances are what allowed their families to survive the years of Serb-run apartheid and their savings are fueling a retail-level boom in many Kosovar towns.

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